Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Wires
Silverlancer writes "Room temperature superconductors have often been a hallmark of far-future science fiction. But fortunately for us, they're here today, according to MIT's Technology Review. Richard Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the buckyball, is currently heading a project to produce a prototype carbon nanotube superconductor. They've already produced some wires up to 100 meters long--the only thing left to do is figure out how to produce only a certain type of nanotube, the "5,5 armchair nanotube," that conducts so well that it can be considered a superconductor."
I'm sure that in the next 5 minutes, the "5,5 armchair nanotube" will be criticized by the armchair physicists, the Slashdot equivalent of the armchair quarterback.
100 times stronger than a normal conductor, and able to carry a thousand volts in a sinlge bound!
That out the way, this is great news. There are so many useful scientific applications for superconducting wires that this is really cool news, once you get over the ethical dilemma caused by the fact that they are making them by *cloning* the orginals. It's ok to clone wires but not people? Hypocrites.
Interestingly,Dr. Smalley talked about armchair nanotube technology at the senate Oversight hearing on sustainable, low emission, electricity generation Full Committee Hearing almost one year ago. The full text is here.
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If a first post occurs via a quantum wire in an article when every bodies threshold is +1, did it really occur?
A superconductor is in a different league to a conductor, even a really good one. That's all this appears to be about, a really good conductor.
great! now i have something geekish to use for bondage with girls.
In short, not all new technologies will help bring about the worker paradise. Scientist and their capitalist pig ways!!! Soon the proletariat will rise and all you carbon nanotube superconductor makers will find yourselves up against a brick wall...
*bang!*
Seems like from one direction optical computing is advancing, from another we're working towards room-temperature superconductors.
So what's the future look like? Quantum processors with superconducting and optical connections? I wonder how these various technologies will actually be deployed?
While the effects are still debated, would this have any effect on radiation given off from high tension power lines? Would the electricity be carried at a higher or lower frequency?
Superconducting wires are "here today", the only left to do is to make super conducting wires.
In other news, I am now a billionaire with a super model trophy wife. The only thing left is for me to get a lot of money and a hot wife.
The article says that there is "almost no loss of energy." But real superconductors truly have zero resistance. Once you start a current in a superconducting loop it runs for years without decreasing. AFAIK a decrease has never been observed. The article is unclear about whether this actually is a super-conductor or not. Does anyone know for a fact?
So much work (and funding) is being poured into finding alternative energy sources, I wonder how much the discovery of a scaleable, inexpensive, widely deployable (as in converting the world's energy grid) superconducting power distribution system has been quantified.
I do understand that this isn't that, and that there are a million barriers to be overcome, and that fossil fuels need a replacement Real Soon Now, but I do wonder if anyone knows of any studies out there trying sort out how much energy is currently lost in the distribution of consumer power, and how much less we'd need to generate if a practical superconducting solution is found.
Factoring in a reasonable probability of success in both sides, it would be interesting to see whether the potential cost/benefit of investments in finding superconducting solutions all the way to the last mile might be as or more efficient in the long run than funding research in new power sources.
I know, it shouldn't be either or in any case, but it's just a thought...
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
The armchair nanotube is great for those lazy electrons who put up a lot of resistance to doing work.
So if that electron in your life is giving you heat about the pressure they are under this new product from LazyBoy is the perfect gift for them!
yes, but will the cloned carbon nanotubes have.....souls?
i doubt any work on this will be allowed by the current administration.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Isn't this more akin to seeding crystal growth? Using the word cloning might confuse the lay person.
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The most essential thing about a superconductor isn't the zero resistance, but the meissner effect. So if they manage to create wires with near-zero resistance, they will not have created `near-superconductors'.
For energy transportation and storage it doesn't matter all that much, cause zero resistance (even without superconductivity) would make energy transportation and storage better
There was a discussion yesterday about using LEDs to replace incandescent lights. One thing that came up was the power losses associated with stepping down the mains voltage to voltages required by LEDs.
Even if the carbon nanotubes are not technically superconductors, if their resistance is much lower than copper they might be ideal for low voltage home wiring. You could step the mains down to 5 or 12 volts in a central location in your house, and power the all your low voltage electronics without having to worry about I^2R losses.
A room temp super-conductor would be a boon for great speeds with less heat.
Actually, there are already plans for it. Search for "nanotube transistor" on google, and admire.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_16 /b3929120_mz018.htm
From the url:
"Even though such transistors are still in their infancy, says IBM's Avouris, "Carbon nanotubes can get around most of the problems that doom very small silicon devices." In the lab, he has backed this statement up. It took him four years to assemble his current, third-generation prototype of a carbon nanotube transistor, but in the end, the device can carry up to 1,000 times the current of the copper wires used in today's silicon chips, making it vastly more efficient."
Two years later Sheng et al demonstrated superconductivity in carbon nanotubes. The experiment was conducted below 20K and the data collected was consistent with the Bardeen-Cooper-Schreiffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity.
For practical applications one wants the superconducting phenomenon to occur at much higher temperature. A material becomes superconducting when its electrons pair up. Normally such negatively charged particles would repel each other, but in a positively charged crystal structure, vibrations called phonons help them get together. In carbon nanotubes, the frequency of these vibrations is very high, which, in theory at least, means superconductivity at higher temperatures.
Chemistry is just an abstraction of physics (just as biology is an abstraction of chemistry) :)
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When electricity can be transmitted large distances with little loss than it would lead to tremendous growth in renewable energy. For instance one could cover huge areas in the Sahara desert with solar cells or one could use geothermal energy in Iceland or one could use hydroelectric power from the Hudson Bay. There are plenty of areas where cheap electric power could be generated but are too far from where that energy is needed. It would also mean that we could improve the efficiency of all electric motors as it would mean reduced heat and reduced need to rid the motor of that heat. If this technology were certain to be accomplished in even a twenty year time span it would lead to a tremendous change in our energy policies but I for one will remain skeptical.
They've already produced some wires up to 100 meters long--the only thing left to do is figure out how to produce only a certain type of nanotube, the "5,5 armchair nanotube," that conducts so well that it can be considered a superconductor."
Does the amount of conductivity depend on how you set the little lever on the side of the armchair?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
on average around 2% of energy is lost during transmission over power lines. It'll be different in different countries. It all depends how far you are from the station.
On the other hand, convertng fuel to heat in order to generate electricity is typically around 40% efficient with a 60% loss of energy. Combined cycle power stations are closer to 60% efficient with a 40% loss of energy. The laugh is that the single largest use of electricity is to produce heat, but we're only doing it at around 40% efficiency with a 60% loss.
What we should be doing is using that 60% waste heat from the power stations to heat our houses and offices directly and using the electricity to power stuff. It's called Combined Heat and Power (CHP) or District Heating (DH). We'd then be closer to 80% -> 90% efficient.
CHP and DH systems have already been in use in northern european countries (Denmark, Finland etc) for decades, they are nothing new. I guess the UK and USA literally have money to burn.
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I'm at Rice University, and I can tell you what the real situation is. Smalley has DARPA and NASA money to try to do something he calls continued growth: to take an existing carbon nanotube, and increase its length in a gas-phase chemical vapor deposition process. They are having limited success. Don't go buying your space-elevator stock yet.
Separately, Smalley and collaborators have been working on spinning fibers from ropes of nanotubes (basically short (less than 1 micron) tubes bundled together by van der waals forces). Those are the fibers that can be meters long. These fibers do not consist of meter-long tubes!
Finally, metallic nanotubes are not room temperature superconductors. In fact, they are not even ballistic over length scales larger than a micron. Smalley's habit of implying otherwise is really annoying to any physicist who knows anything about these systems.
Now, a long fiber of only metallic nanotubes would still have conductivity better than copper at much less the weight, and would therefore be very important industrially if it could be made economically. There is a huge difference between that and having no electrical resistance, though.
> I suspect that if the wire is in a magnetic
> field it will lose it's superconductivity
> - thus it wouldn't work in an electric motor.
1) Superconductors only lose their superconductivity when exposed to a field strength in excess of the threshold for the material they are made of. Superconductors are, in fact, used to produce extremely strong magnetic fields for things like MRI machines. Motors and generators (some very large) _have_ been made with them and they have real advantages: they are just not cost effective in most applications.
2) We are not talking about superconductors. I see no reason why ballistic ultraconductors should not work in high magnetic fields.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If you coil a superconductor into a torus, it sounds like it will loop around the torus forever with no losses. How much electricity can you feed into it? Is the size of the coil a significant factor? If there is an easy way to feed electricity into it, and later pull electricity from it, have we created a perfect battery?
If powerlines could have negligible resistance, then it will be viable to transmit power as DC. (At the moment, AC is used to minimize power loss during transmission.) This could mean that devices could plug into a (say) 12V DC outlet right in the wall, eliminating all the heat loss from each individual transformer, and getting rid of the bulk. Imagine, your computer wouldn't need some massive AC-DC power supply! (Obviously it'd still need a small, simple one to transform down to 5V, etc.)